A day spent "idle and blessed": report of an experiment
30th November 2012
In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day": Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean - the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of …
Headache & migraine: new NICE guideline
20th November 2012
In September, the National Institute for Health & Clinical Evidence (NICE) published a guideline offering "evidence-based advice on the diagnosis and management of tension-type headache, migraine (including migraine with aura and menstrual-related migraine), cluster headache and medication overuse headache in young people (aged 12 years and older) and adults." The …
Working with traumatic memories: trauma-focused CBT and an introduction to rescripting
19th November 2012
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear." James Hollingworth Yesterday I wrote a post "Working with traumatic memories: KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and the virtues of straightforward prolonged exposure". Today I would like to consider what fuller …
Working with traumatic memories: KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and the virtues of straightforward prolonged exposure
18th November 2012
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo da Vinci "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Sainte Exupery I have just written a series of three posts on Arntz & Jacob's new book …
Arntz & Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice": links with trauma-focused CBT and Marylene Cloitre's work on complex PTSD
17th November 2012
I've written a couple of recent blog posts - "Arntz & Jacob's new book 'Schema therapy in practice': some introductory comments" and "Arntz & Jacob's new book 'Schema therapy in practice': links with attachment theory and with therapies for self-compassion". In today's post I want to look at ST's focus …
Arntz & Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice": links with attachment theory and with therapies for self-compassion
16th November 2012
Yesterday I wrote a post "Arntz & Jacob's new book 'Schema therapy in practice: some introductory comments" about the recently published and potentially broadly applicable extension of this Dutch team's previously successful treatment approach for borderline personality disorder. So the authors comment "While schema therapy was originally developed for clients …
Arntz & Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice": some introductory comments
15th November 2012
Arnoud Arntz & Gitta Jacob's new book "Schema therapy in practice: an introductory guide to the schema mode approach" was published last month. The book's back cover states "Schema Therapy in Practice presents a comprehensive introduction to schema therapy for nonspecialist practitioners wishing to incorporate it into their practice. The …
Rumination: brooding, pondering, mindfulness, hypersensitivity, concreteness, writing - raising as many questions as answers
13th November 2012
Probably most cogntive-behavioural therapists subscribe to the general comment that rumination is a bad for depression. And it is, but as Oscar Wilde said "The truth is rarely pure and never simple". Smith & Alloy, in their 2009 paper "A roadmap to rumination: a review of the definition, assessment, and …
How can we best assess the healthiness of our diet?
12th November 2012
I have recently written a couple of blog posts about diet and mental health - "Emerging research on diet suggests it's startlingly important in the prevention of anxiety & depression" and "So what dietary advice should we be following - for psychological as well as physical health?" An obvious related …
Recent research: articles from October journals
8th November 2012
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 18,600 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …